Desires and Dreams for 2011 [Video]

On December 24 I woke up typing into my cell phone some wishes and short predictions of what 2011 could bring those of us who live on this Island. After sending some 140 character texts via Twitter, it occurred to me to ask my friends and acquaintances to send me their own hopes and I promised to catapult them into cyberspace. Within a few hours my Motorola inbox collapsed under the weight of so many forecasts and expectations for the coming months. Curiously, one word was repeated in the majority of those messages, the eight letters of the elusive libertad filled a good part of the text messages that came to me on Christmas Eve.

So I would like, in these final days of 2010, to post my own concept of freedom on Generation Y. In these images, filmed by a couple of young German filmmakers, I sum up my relationship with this concept absent from our lives, but not from our aspirations.

* The video is a fragment of the film "I'm Free," by Andrea Roggan of Germany, which is still being edited.

Yoani's comments from the video:

For me, freedom, although I don't fully know it, signifies a goal, an objective to go toward, and I fundamentally believe that freedom is the possibility of standing on a street corner and shouting "There is no freedom here!" I believe it is a space where you can get more and more freedom.

Well, freedom begins within you. The day you wake up and say I will not to pretend anymore, I will not wear the mask anymore, I will not allow them to continue stealing pieces of my opinion, pieces of my freedom of movement... well, in my case it started when I began this adventure that is Generation Y, my blog on the internet, which is a long process of internal liberation. It is like a therapy, above all to shake off years and years of apathy, years and years of silence.

Yoani's blog, Generation Y, can be read here in English translation.Translating Cuba is a new compilation blog with Yoani and other Cuban bloggers in English.